Often, people create a receive pipeline for each flat file messagetype that must be received. This is done because the flat file disassembler needs to know exactly which document schema is to be used to parse the incoming message, as opposed to the XML disassembler, which will find the schema at runtime. So instead of having several flat file disassemblers in one pipeline, often, many pipelines are created.

BUT, I'd just like to point out that with BizTalk 2006, you can change properties of the pipeline components on a per instance level. So double click on your receive location, click the ellipsis on the pipeline and go to the "DocumentSpecName" property of the flat file disassembler. Why they haven't called it "Document Schema" as it is called in the pipeline designer, I don't know!

Anyway, here you can specify which document schema this pipeline instance should use. You must specify the fully qualified .NET typename of the schema, however. And it is a textbox, not a drop down, as in the designer. You can get the .NET typename by clicking on the .xsd in solution explorer, and taking it from the "Fually Qualified Name" property.

BUT, I'd just like to point out that with BizTalk 2006, you can change properties of the pipeline components on a per instance level. So double click on your receive location, click the ellipsis on the pipeline and go to the "DocumentSpecName" property of the flat file disassembler. Why they haven't called it "Document Schema" as it is called in the pipeline designer, I don't know!

Where again is this? When I have opened up the Receive Location I only get a drop down list of my deployed schemas.

If you open up the BizTalk Server2006 Administration Console, and get down to a list of receive locations. Then, double click on a receive location, and then, just to the right of the chosen pipeline for that receive location, you can click on the two dots "..". That will give you a screen, where you can change the following properties of the flat file disassembler; DocumentSpecName, HeaderSpecName, PreserveHeader, RecoverableInterchangeProcessing, TrailerSpecName and ValidateDocumentStructure. So just alter whatever property you need to alter here and click OK.

I have no idea where you are getting the drop down list of deployed schemas? Here, the DocumentSpecName is a textbox and not a drop down list.

That is pretty cool. What this means is that you really only need to deploy a single recieve and send pipeline. I discovered about that and talked about it <a href="http://blog.biztalk-info.com/archive/2006/08/08/FlatFile_Pipeline_behavior_changes.aspx">here</a>, and now I learn about the receive pipeline can do something similar.